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  It's finally here: Paperback 1.0! My fast, fully accessible ebook and document reader is now out on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, with iOS following the second Apple decides to actually look at it. The changelog is once again way too big for any post, so here are the highlights: New platform: Linux! As an AppImage or a tarball, with desktop integration so documents open straight from your file manager. New formats: Comic book archives (.cbz).M4B and MP3 audiobooks, split into their cha...

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  Alphabet spent $44.9 billion on capex in a single quarter and guided up to $200B this year to build AI datacenters. Meanwhile, stock TalkBack has been rebuilding the entire screen traversal tree three times per swipe for half a decade or more. In just one week of off-hours hacking between dayjobs and other responsibilities, a few blind hackers made Backtalk, a fork of TalkBack cutting swipe lag by 300ms, fixing the braille keyboard rotation, adding raw touch passthrough for games and on-device v...

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  Okay, time for me to be that person. I know I've got people who follow me and who I follow who disagree with me on this, and I am interested in hearing differing viewpoints on it as I am for all topics minus joining the MAGA movement. That said, I likely won't argue or engage here for very long, I'm just getting thoughts out and do find dialog around this interesting. Say what you will about large language models, and I do. But they can literally function as eyeballs as a service. I&...

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  Version 0.3.2 of Taskmon, my super light-weight and keyboard friendly Task Manager replacement for Windows, just got released. Changelog: Added column reordering. The Settings dialog is now split into a General tab and a Columns tab, and on the Columns tab you can reorder columns with Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down or with the Move up and Move down buttons. Taskmon saves the order between runs.Fixed column header drag and drop being forgotten on restart, and leaving the accessible sort buttons in the old...

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  You’ve used ~261972× more tokens than The Great Gatsby.

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  Holy crap, turns out there is actually a very big difference between Claude Opus on Pro and Claude Opus on Max. Hot damn, I am actually impressed with Opus on Max, but on Pro it just wasted time. I guess that makes sense from a business perspective, but I wrote off Opus way too quick. I doubt I'll end up keeping Claude Max, I really do not need the 5x usage limits, but figured I'd try it for a month, see how well it works and what Fable's all about etc.

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  The Second Coming looks a lot more practical than the prophecies suggested. From Uber Eats, no less. "JESUS is in a Chrysler Town and Country"

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  RE: https://dragonscave.space/@TheQuinbox/117180235975355073 It's honestly depressing how bad stock TTS APIs are across the board. Paperback on mobile has truly shown me this; I outline how the iOS side of this works in the quoted post, and Android is its own flavor of hacky: we synthesize ahead to temporary WAV files and chain MediaPlayer instances with setNextMediaPlayer() to kill the inter-paragraph silence put there with the stock player. On both platforms, getting a seamless readin...

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  And Paperback for iOS is now in public Test Flight! My original plan was to publish both Android and iOS at the same time, but Google is unexpectedly dragging their feet, and when I heard this email come in I literally stopped my work for a minute to come post this. It's still not perfect, there's one bug I've found so far if your book contains , but that's easily fixable and now this way many more actual iOS users can throw rocks at it. https://testflight.apple.com/join/e5622MJK

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  And finally, the release you've all been waiting for: Paperback 0.9.0! The changelog is so large it had to be completely restructured, and wouldn't fit in even two full-length posts at over 6300 characters, but here are some highlights: native macOS support has arrived, alongside ARM64 Windows builds! Documents are now paginated, so even multi-million-word books load in seconds flat. You can customize every single keyboard shortcut through a simple dialog; a new readability tab lets you...

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  Paperback can now load a 70 MB, 34 million word epub that used to crash it. It still takes it around 20 seconds to do so and I'm now working on fixing that, but this just made spending most of my morning on this worth it, not to mention the fact that it now loads 16.5 million epubs in around a second. Weeee!

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  If you're a blind Claude Code user, put the following line in your settings.json: "axScreenReader": true restart Claude Code, and have your life changed forever. I can now properly review and resume old claude sessions, I don't get endless Unicode symbols spammed at me, I can review the output with my review cursor much easier... OMG this is so nice!

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  My final grades for the very last college class I ever had to take have now posted. I'm done. I've graduated. Goodbye college!

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  I've once again gotta hand it to HumanWare's technical support department. The USB-C end of my BrailleNote evolve's sharger snapped clean off in the port yesterday, leaving frayed wires atop a laptop charger's cable and a small metal component inside my back USB-C port. Managed to get the metal piece out and unplug the cable as to make it not a fire hazard on my carpet floor, and then I called humanware. Without asking any real probing questions, they had a new ch...

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  Been testing document parsing on the evolve's hardware this afternoon. When throwing a massive file like Worm at it, Paperback parses and renders it in 2-3 seconds. Meanwhile, HumanWare's own Victor Reader application hangs for about 45 seconds trying to build out a heavy WebView2 DOM tree before completely choking and throwing a fatal null reference. Even on standard files that do load, the parsing engine in Victor Reader adds strange rendering artifacts: EPUB's and HTML...

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  I've just released version 0.3.0 of Taskmon, my lightweight, no frills replacement for the modern, bloated mess that is Windows Task Manager. Changelog: Added Ctrl+Q as a shortcut to exit Taskmon completely.Added 11 new columns: Service, GPU, GPU Memory, CPU Time, Elevated, Path, Window Title, File Version, Product Version, Session Name, and Package Name.Added File > Restart as administrator to relaunch Taskmon elevated.Added a hierarchical Process Tree view (Ctrl+T) that groups processes...

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  If you manufacture Braille displays, and make the only indication that the battery is completely dead an LED on the side of the device, something has gone very wrong somewhere. Like...you do realize that people who need braille...can't typically see lights very well if at all, right? I get not flashing something on the braille display, 200v even at low amperage is too much for a dead LI battery, but vibrate? Something that, uh, your primary userbase can actually detect? [sighs].

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  Thoughts/feedback wanted! Working through pricing for Paperback across platforms as 0.9.0 gets ever closer. My current thinking is: * Windows & macOS direct downloads: Free as always from paperback.dev. * Mac (and maybe Windows?) Stores: ~$10 (for auto-updates & covering dev fees). * iOS and Android Stores: ~$20 one-time purchase (to support native mobile codebases & dev account costs). Paperback is very much a passion project, so asking even this for any of it feels weird/wrong some...

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  Today I learned: On Windows 11 at least, Windows+Shift+Dash types an em dash (—). Have yet to find any other combo like this that does anything similar.

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  I noticed some core NVDA modifications (namely unfamiliar .pyc files in library.zip) while poking around on my BrailleNote evolve, so I reached out to Andrew Flatres about GPLv2 source compliance. To my delight, HumanWare actually packaged up the source code for the community! If anyone wants to take a look under the hood at how their commands and display layers interact: https://humanware.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/braillenote/Evolv/Public/nvda.zip Huge thanks to Andrew and the team for turnin...

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  Until YouTube makes it possible to boost quiet audio natively in the web player, I will not feel a single drop of guilt about using yt-dlp or watching maintainers fix whatever they broke for the third time this week. Google can throw billions at walling off their platform, but no amount of corporate money will ever out-code a bunch of nerds driven by open-source idealism and a deeply autistic need to archive everything. Just give up already.

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  It's getting closer and closer to Paperback 0.9.0 release time, which of course means Paperback mobile! However, mobile app stores are mobile app stores, and in order to get the Android version into the Play Store, I'll need 12 testers to install it on their device and use it for 14 days. Not necessarily every single day for hours on end, but please don't just install it and let it sit there for two weeks, Google actually tracks if people do this unfortunately. I've got a couple...

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  So... I have to eat some serious humble pie here: after throwing a huge fit on my timeline and declaring the evolve effectively dead to me, I'm actually keeping it. What turned it around was taking it to Phoenix as my only laptop for a long weekend and realizing that having a full x86 Windows rig with 32 GB of RAM that I can throw over my shoulder, compile paperback natively on, run WSL with, and do real software development on without needing a host PC running at home is just too useful for...

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  If your ebook reader app can't even attempt to open a raw .txt file, in 2026, something has gone profoundly, fundamentally wrong in the development process. Plain text is literally the baseline of computing, how is this an edge case? Speaking from experience, it's moderately difficult to have a parser that handles almost all .txt files in all encodings well, but not even trying is just pethetic.

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  Brought the BrailleNote evolve as my only laptop on a trip to hang out with some friends, and it worked beautifully! I was still nowhere near my 130 WPM on a qwerty keyboard typing speed, which is why I'm really looking forward to the qwerty, and the battery did need topped off a little bit more than my laptop would've, but not by as much as I expected, and it made my backpack noticeably smaller and lighter. I still see benifits to Android-based Braille notetakers, absolutely. You cannot...

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  Life is too short to vibe-code features into existence when a dedicated tool literally completely solved the problem in question. If you want to read an EPUB, just use Paperback and save yourself the formatting heartbreak.

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  Blind heivmind: is there a decently cheap and accurate way of preserving a physical braille document digitally? If I need to get a crappy flatbed scanner for this that's okay and honestly expected, I'm mainly wondering if someone has made something that effectively takes OBR and converts it to BRF, or if I'll have to code one.

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  One thing I will say about the evolve is how unexpectedly intuitive the braille keyboard is for doing Windows things. Not every single thing, I have a tool that uses a global hotkey involving the backslash key and I just can't do that on the evolve, but doing things like windows + d, windows + r, alt + tab, etc. feel way more intuitive than I expected them to. The modifier keys are pretty well done.

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  My initial impressions of the BrailleNote evolve as a product still aren't 100% glowing, but the fact that HumanWare support helped me get my braille back (by reinstalling Windows), on a weekend, especially the weekend of July 4th, says something incredibly positive about their support team. That's something you don't get many places. The evolve's going through OOBE again over there.

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  Yeah...I'm afraid this evolve is almost certainly going back. I'm going to keep it for another couple weeks, see if I change my mind and how well it holds up on a trip, but this is...I'll just say that I agree with any reviewer who called this product rushed. Pressing the home button to bring up the main menu can take up to 10 seconds and focuses you on the taskbar before it does so, in most text fields, but not all, hitting an arrow key while you have a word of untranslated braille...